An email header contains information about the email, including the sender and recipient, the route the email took to get to the recipient’s inbox, and other details. The OIT Service Desk or IT support staff may ask you to provide email header information in order to troubleshoot email delivery issues.
Viewing Email Header Information
To view email header information, refer to the resource for your email application:
- Gmail Trace an email with its full headers
- Outlook application and Outlook on the web: View internet messages in Outlook
- Mac Mail: Show detailed headers in Mail on Mac
- Thunderbird:
- Open your Thunderbird application
- Open the email message for which you want header information
- From the View menu, select Message Source. A new window will appear displaying the full, unformatted message.
You can then copy the header information and provide it to IT support for investigation, if requested.
Note: IT support would like to know what headers you see. On mail in your Outlook sent folder, this may be none. Reporting "nothing" is useful for mail in this folder.